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In our 5:30 p.m. post, we reported on a vote held today among members of the Georgia State Board of Elections that raised concerns about the upcoming election.

We have now received the results indicating that the Board has approved a new rule that requires poll workers to hand count the number of ballots after voting has closed.

By a 3-2 vote, the board passed the rule against the advice of the state Attorney General’s Office, the Secretary of State’s Office and an association of county election officials.

Three board members who were praised by Donald Trump at a rally in Atlanta last month voted for the measure, while the board’s lone Democrat and the bipartisan chairman voted against it.

The office of the state’s Attorney General, Chris Carr, said in a memo sent to members of the Board of Elections yesterday that there is no provision in state law to hand-count ballots at the precinct level before they are turned over to the precinct’s election official for vote counting.

As a result, the memo states, the rule is “not bound by any law” and “likely represents precisely the kind of impermissible legislation that agencies should not be allowed to enact.”

U.S. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger last month called the manual counting rule “misguided,” saying it would delay the announcement of election results and pose risks to evidence-gathering procedures.

Voting rights activists also fear that this could pave the way for unfounded election challenges.

The new rule requires that the number of ballots – not the number of votes cast – must be counted by three poll workers at each polling station until all three results are the same. If there are more than 750 ballots in a scanner at the end of voting, the returning officer can decide not to start counting until the next day.

In Georgia, voters make their selections on a touchscreen voting machine, which then prints a paper ballot containing a human-readable list of the options the voter selected and a QR code that is read by a scanner to count the votes.

Supporters of the new rule said it was necessary to ensure that the number of ballots in the scanners at the end of the day matches the number of voters recorded by the check-in computers and the number of ballots recorded by the voting machines and scanners. Memory cards that record votes at polling stations will be used to count votes on election night.

Several county election officials who spoke out against the rule during a public hearing before the vote warned that manually counting ballots at polling stations could delay the announcement of results on election night. They also worried that it could put an additional burden on poll workers who already have a long day at work.

Representatives of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials warned that the rule would ultimately undermine confidence in the process.